


Numbers

by esama



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe, Child Murder, Dark, Dissociation, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Murder, Past Character Death, Post V-Day, Post-Apocalypse, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 08:21:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4172688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tumblr prompt fic - Eggsy recruited AFTER V-day</p>
            </blockquote>





	Numbers

**Author's Note:**

> Proofread by Darlene  
> Prompt by leefdoor on tumblr

After V-day, there is a new type of registry.

It's done over the piles upon piles of corpses, on top of mass graves and the sort of funeral pyres humankind has tried to move past and yet hasn't. Mounds of corpses, covered in petrol, set on fire… those sorts of funeral pyres. There's just so many dead that there's no time, no funds, no fucking _space_ to bury them all – and definitely no means to treat them in all those fancy ways corpses are treated in morgues and mortuaries, to keep them from spoiling and rotting and becoming disease bombs ready to flood the population with the fucking plague.

Four billion people dead worldwide. Where the fuck is there space for that many dead people? Nowhere.

The registry is written in the blood of all those people – under the name of their killers. It's done haphazardly, tiredly, wearily, and no one checks the numbers. Fuck, there is no one really left to check details like that.

Eggsy goes to the registry willingly, feeling just as hollow as the female cop – one of the few ones still left alive – who types out his name, his information and then, The Number. The Number, in fucking capitals, written in big bolded letters on his file. His _Number_.

His death count.

"Fifty eight," Eggsy says, and the woman looks up, meets his eyes, and just believes him. Doesn't ask him how, doesn't as him where, when, who. Eggsy's killed fifty eight people and all he gets for it is a Number in his ID records. Gary Unwin, twenty three years old, **58**.

He pretty much knows what she thinks. People with a count that high were in vehicles, or they had access to high power weapons, or some shit like that. They had _devices_ of some type that facilitated the count. Either that or they were in those gruesome situations where they were facing people physically weaker than themselves – like, say, school children, invalids, the elderly. Those were the worst stories.

Although he's heard of one old lady who – before she killed herself – had a number of sixty or so, because she was stuck behind a wheel when her phone went off. She ran through a crowd, doubled back, ran through it again and again, until people stopped moving. That was the sort of thing that got you a count over one or two.

Eggsy wasn't in a car, though, or anything like that. He was in a pub. A fucking _pub_ full of adults, a lot of them bigger than him.

After the cop nods her head and then calls "Next," Eggsy stands up and just shuffles off, and no one looks at him, no one asks why he's here – they all know why he's there. There's a long – short, so fucking short – line of people just like him, with pale faces and sunken eyes and hollow looks on their faces and _Numbers_ in their heads.

Once outside the station, he takes a deep breath and knows that the number will be on his record for the rest of his days. Eggsy Unwin will now forever have that mark on him, **58** , as if it's tattooed on his fucking forehead. Who knows, maybe it'll eventually go on his ID, his driver's licence. That is, of course, if the UK manages to actually survive long enough for anyone to actually do shit like print licences. The Royal family is dead, most of the fucking parliament is dead… it'll be fucking lucky if they manage to outlast the fucking month.

He could've not gone, he could've avoided it. A lot of people did, they never said what they did – some even pretended that they hadn't done anything at all, that they somehow made it through unscathed. But most everyone did _something_. That was why they were still alive. Still. He could've been like them, pretended innocence – no one would've fucking know because he killed every single fucking witness and…

 Taking a breath, Eggsy runs a hand along his neck, staring up at the sky. It's fucking sunny.

His mother committed suicide that morning because Daisy's blood wouldn't wash off her hands. Eggsy took her body out to be burned and didn't stick around to watch her being thrown onto the most recent pile – just logged in her name and details and let her be added to the long list of death tolls. There wouldn't be a grave for her any more than there'd be one for Daisy.

Too many deaths. Everyone he's pretty much ever known in his whole fucking life is fucking _dead_. Lots of those people by his hand.

He's going to be going home to an empty, blood stained house, no one there to beat him, no one there to welcome him home. He wishes… he wishes. But then, they all fucking do.

Eggsy releases the breath he was holding, and walks away from the police station, a mass murdered lawfully on the loose.

 

* * *

 

The first person who asks Eggsy, "What's your Number," gets Eggsy's fist in his teeth. It's a weak punch, barely even knocks a tooth loose, and Eggsy remembers for a moment what it felt like to beat a guy's nose in, _really_ beat a guy's nose in, drive it into his blood soaked face, deeper, deeper… until the guy stopped moving.

His hand is bleeding afterwards, recent wounds torn open and maybe Eggsy should bandage that shit before he gets gangrene or something. But he can't really find the energy to do more than get a bottle of vodka and wash his knuckles with it until it runs clear, until it starts to hurt.

He thinks, vaguely, that he should feel sorry. For something. He should feel sorry for the people he can still _feel_ on his torn knuckles and under his bleeding hands, at the end of broken bottles and torn-off chair legs. He should feel sorry for the people he looked at down the sight of Rottweiler's pistol, for the people guided into the wall, for the people whose heads he slammed down again and again and again…

He should feel something.

Really though, the fucker should've fucking known better than to ask. You're not supposed to ask.

 

* * *

 

The grocery stores are handing out food to anyone who wants it. There's nowhere near enough customers to buy the stuff anymore, and with the power going on and off intermittently, the stuff's starting to go bad. Eggsy picks up a couple of bags of non-perishable stuff and stocks the house and then he stares at the stroller in the kitchen, and wonders if he got baby food.

That night he sleeps outside on the concrete balconies of the fucking brutalist council estate, not caring who fucking comes across him, who does what to him. Not that anyone will do fucking anything – because he's pretty sure he's the only one still living in the fucking place.

The night is silent – there's barely any cars, and no sounds of people. It's eerie as fuck, and with the power out again, the stars overhead are really fucking bright – like, unnaturally bright. The Milky Way shines down, colossal and just incandescent and altogether otherworldly and it would almost be beautiful. Except he's not supposed to see it. There's supposed to be a hundred voices screaming about the power out, whining about lost TV signals, and cut off internet and their phones not connecting – and there's no one.

There's no one.

It's just him, out on the concrete, trying to hate himself and not able to because he can't fucking _feel anything_.

He's spiralling down, but then, fucking everyone is. There's a lot people out on the streets, sleeping in alleys – there are millions of empty houses and flats and fucking entire buildings out there, whole fucking _estates_. Four billion people's worth of empty space suddenly open, and people opt to sleep in the streets. Just like him.

Because homes are emptier. There's nothing inside. 

He sleeps out in the open in one of the worst neighbourhoods there is and no one bothers him. No one cares.

 

* * *

 

He doesn't kill himself. Lots of people do, all over the world, the wave of suicides is fucking _population_ _threatening_ , or so the news says, but he doesn't really even think about it. It's not bravery or strength or anything – it's nothing, really, it's fucking _nothing_ because he can't find any more reason to kill himself than he can find a reason to keep on living. He's stuck in this in between state of existing without a rudder, nowhere to go, no one to talk to, nothing to do but keep on going.

He thinks he should maybe offer help to people, except he doesn't know how to help and no one knows what they want anymore. Except maybe for time to go backwards, to way it was before, to undo all this shit, to make it alright again – and well, he can't do that, can he? So he does nothing.

Fucking no one does anything. Everyone's waiting, he thinks. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, and take the rest of them out too. Whether religious or not, whether fanatic or not, they're all waiting for the fallout, for the counter reaction – the fucking consequences.

And it just doesn't fucking come. Oh there's talk of terrorists and finding the people responsible, of getting justice – but fuck… does that even matter? And is there anyone actually left to fucking fight for what torn pieces of the world's left? Every single fucking army on earth tore itself to bits, every police force was taken out by friendly fire. There's no one left to hunt the bad guys, and no one has the energy to try.

Eggsy entertains for a while the idea of signing up for the Marines again – it wouldn't make his mum go mental again, after all. He could get through training this time, make it out, do something with… with whatever's left of him.

He doesn't.

Instead he goes back to the Black Prince. There's no one there, and Eggsy just stands there for a while, taking in the broken windows, the torn stools, the ripped curtains and the shards of a hundred broken bottles. There's blood everywhere, dried brown and rusty now, and he can remember spilling most of it.

He stares, and still doesn't feel anything.

After a while, he heads to the back to find a broom and start cleaning up the mess he made.

 

* * *

 

Eggsy has the Black Prince almost standing by the time he finds his rudder.

He's cleaned the floors as well as he could, glass shards removed, blood almost wiped out. Not enough water to waste on washing, though, but he managed it. He's taken the planks from a nearby fence, covered the broken windows with them, it's almost good enough to keep the wind and rain out. He's repaired whatever furniture he could, the rest's he sets aside. He even got a wood burning stove for indoor heating, setting it up with the exhaust leading out of the window, and it almost makes it warm inside.

The place is, while not anything like what it used to be, good. Eggsy sits by the counter on a somewhat wobbly bar stool and drinks a pint and tries to warm up. Everything smells like wood smoke and blood but fuck… at least it keeps the smell of funeral pyres out.

And then he gets a customer. Except it's not.

It's a man who, despite the fucking times, is wearing a fucking suit, who has hair neatly slicked back, who even has a fucking umbrella and everything. Eggsy stares at him, tired and expressionless and wonders how weirdly insulting it is, to see someone in their fucking best when the world is at its fucking worst.

The guy has an eye patch over his left eye and that side of his head is sort of red and swollen in that _recent reconstruction surgery_ way, so whatever he is and whatever he's fucking doing in a fucking suit, at least it doesn't look like he made it out of V-day unscathed.

"Eggsy Unwin," the man says. Doesn't ask. _Says_.

"Yeah?" Eggsy asks, and drinks his beer. It's warm, but still makes him cold. Maybe he killed someone this guy knows. He killed a lot of people.

The man glances around them, at the still torn and bloodied pub, it's recent, awkward rebuilding. Then he looks at Eggsy who doesn't bother to even try and make himself seem more presentable. He stays sitting all huddled and awkward, broken and hollow and not even trying to pretend otherwise. The man looks at him, sees all of that – and it's the same hollowness in his eyes, the same _lack_ of everything. Same empty howling void of nothing. He looks, meets his eyes, and just understands.

Eggsy thinks he could hate him for that. Could love him for that.

The posh git looks at him, just looks for a long while, before he finally speaks.

"Would you like to do something good with your life, Eggsy?"

 

* * *

Harry Hart's number is a hundred and thirty four. Like Eggsy, he can't feel anything about it.

 


End file.
